Performance bounds for a class of workflow diagrams

Abstract

Recently the study of workflow diagrams has received considerable attention in business process modelling. Formal methods such as Petri nets have been used to analyze and verify of logical properties. However, to our best knowledge, due to the complexity caused by the extreme flexible nature of workflow processes, little work has been done on the performance analysis for workflow diagrams except intensive simulations or approximation analysis based on Stochastic Petri net (SPN) or queueing theory. In this paper, timed workflow diagrams with both AND and OR logic will be modelled and analyzed as stochastic min-max systems. We will provide provable bounds on average tournaround time. The OR logic (known also as the Discriminator [1]) requires that a down-stream event happens whenever one of the upstream events happens. This is different from the AND logic modelling synchronization which requires that the output event happens when all input events happen. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.